


Imagining Adventure

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Fluff, Gen, Pre-Canon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 06:52:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11572695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: A little look at Claire and Chris' childhood. Nothing ominous or meaningful, just my playing around with kids being kids and maybe explaining how the Redfield siblings ended up the way they did.





	Imagining Adventure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jungle_ride](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jungle_ride/gifts).



When Claire was little traveling and adventure had to be one in the same. It made leaving bearable when it happened and it happened constantly. Their family moved frequently thanks to dad’s job, never staying put long enough for either her or Chris to make friends, but that was okay, they had each other and they got along than brothers and sisters typically did.

Chris amused himself and impressed kids in the new towns they ended up in by saying that they moved all the time because their parents were on the run from the mafia, the government or whatever group of people he thought would impress his new classmates the most because he liked making up stories like that. The reality was far more mundane, their dad was an engineer who, more often than not worked as a consultant for whatever business needed him. He’d travel to wherever some big company had an open position, get things going, end up training his replacement, get let go and immediately start searching for the next job.

Long hours spent together in the car or at home with nowhere else to go because mom was at work and dad was waiting for a phone call, _the phone call_ , meant that they’d needed to learn to get along to survive. Boredom was alleviated by playing in the backyard when there was one, exploring the woods behind the house when there were woods to explore, and reading when that wasn’t an option. Chris had been largely responsible for teaching her how to read and had heavily influenced her choices of books and interests.

It was a favorite game of Chris’ to pretend that they were explorers in some foreign jungle when they walked through the woods, just like the characters in the sorts of books the two of them loved to read or the only two survivors of a shipwreck for the year when they lived in the house by the lake. What Chris read supplemented the games, books about explorers, people who survived disasters, how to survive in the woods and what to do in all sorts of worst case scenarios.

He brought his reading and their games into real life too, making things easier. When she was six and heartbroken because they were moving again and she would be leaving her first real friend she refused to pack. No amount of yelling or offers of bribes from her parents would get her to leave her room or stop dumping her suitcase on the living room floor. She’d been just about ready to start throwing a tantrum when Chris came to the rescue. He’d made a game of it, telling her that what if aliens were invading and they needed to get out of dodge in a hurry? Getting out of dodge was something neither of them had knew the meaning of, but they’d heard it or read it somewhere and the term had stuck with them, sounding very adult and very important, something that made her like it all the more. He introduced her to the concept of a G.O.O.D. bag, a set of supplies that you kept ready at all times in case you needed to _G_ et _O_ ut _O_ f _D_ odge at a moment’s notice and after that packing got easier.

Because it would be an adventure and everything was easier if you thought of it as an adventure.

At the one house with the big tree in the backyard they built a tree house together and pretended it was a spaceship, soaring up into the unknown because there had been a musty box of old science fiction magazines left in the basement by the house’s previous owner.

They both missed it when they moved later that year because the trees behind the new house were all too small to build a tree house in, but the woods turned out to be prefect for exploring and in the spring they discovered that the woods were full of wild blueberries.

That, coupled with the discovery of Gary Paulsen, Jean Craighead George, and similar authors started Chris on a foraging kick and they spent all fall and summer going to the library and taking out books on plants to learn which ones were safe to eat. Occasionally they’d even be brave enough to try using what they’d learned, though Chris made her promise not to tell their parents when the two of them got sick eating wild grapes. They blamed it on leftover pizza and for good measure they both refused to eat pizza for several months, because that was how they were. If one of them made up a story the other would automatically back it up.

It turned out to be good practice for the summer where Chris bought an old BB gun at a yard sale and fixed it up without their parents’ knowledge, then broke a window the first time he tested it in the backyard. Luckily their parents were both at work and they had the whole day to come up with a story. It was a simple one, that they knew nothing and had been watching TV in the living room with the volume up so loud that they never heard what had happened. Chris hid the gun away in his bedroom and didn’t take it with him when they next moved, so their parents never knew.

They were so close that she never really thought about the difference in their ages until Chris announced his plans to enlist.

He was sixteen, she was ten, but she didn’t resent him for it. It was the culmination of all their years of moving and pretending, a natural next step. He was going to join the air force, travel the world and when she was old enough she was going to go to college somewhere out of state, join when she was done Doctors Without Borders and travel the world as well. Both of them would be doing good, helping people in their own ways and it would be an adventure.

Neither of them had ever imagined, in their wildest fantasies, where their respective paths would take them. If they’d been told they would have laughed and thought it was a fine story, so far out of the realm of possibility that it made Chris’ childhood stories seem plausible.

As often happens the truth turned out to be far stranger than fiction, but that was still far in the future.

**Author's Note:**

> Not like usually write, but it was fun.


End file.
